Of all the entries in Keir Starmer’s ever-increasing list of things he’d rather not talk about, surely whether he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he came to the UK is currently top.

The Prime Minister and his colleagues certainly give that impression, responding with lumbering reluctance to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants on war crimes charges for the Israeli Prime Minister, his former defence minister Yoav Gallant and a Hamas commander (who may already be dead).

The only easy answer to this question is that it’s a hypothetical situation, as Netanyahu isn’t due to visit any time soon, but the practicalities of handcuffing Bibi aren’t really the central issue here: it’s whether the UK agrees with the ICC or wants to set out its own position on Israel.

The answer was much easier for the Conservatives: their line was always to dismiss these kinds of announcements from the ICC and attack any suggestion of equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Rishi Sunak and Lord Cameron would always pointedly add in any such discussion the line that “too many civilians have died” and that there needed to be de-escalation. The US has an even easier answer to the question, given........

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